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26 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
The Cry of Dereliction, by Ed Loring
M a y 1 9 8 8
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me are words which have a long
history and profound meaning in the Old Testament and throughout the entire
experience of Israel. We, too, live in the days of dereliction. We live in the days
of abandonment.
Often “derelict” refers to old, forgotten, alcoholic men on our streets, but
the epithet also points toward a profound existential place in our own lives when
we see and hear how our society is relentlessly pursuing the abandonment of the
poor, the abandonment of civil rights, the abandonment of affirmative action.
As we abandon our sense of history—the common purse in Christian communities,
the Bible as God’s radical word on behalf of the poor, the stigmata of the
poor in our servanthood and protests—we participate in the power of death
named dereliction.
We members of the family of faith need to remember that a fundamental
responsibility of the spiritual life is to listen to the cry of dereliction and then to
pronounce it to the powers of this world. We must position our lives so that as
we serve, read the newspaper, study scripture and poetry, as we dance and have
babies, we are shaped in our bowels by the experiences of homeless and hungry
derelicts. The cry of dereliction then becomes our own cry. We graft that cry
into our lives, into our hearts, into our wallets, into all our choices.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me Why is there dereliction and
abandonment in our days Dereliction is a very important perspective from
which we are called to live our lives.
In addition to hearing the cry of dereliction among the hungry and homeless
on our streets, our little family named the Open Door Community also listens
to and visits among prisoners. We have a particular focus on those under
the sentence of death. Tonight 120 men and women sit in the shadow of death
by electrocution in the name of all the citizens of Georgia: a sentence upheld by
the American Constitution although the pagan rite of bloodfest and revenge is
outlawed in almost every society that finds its cultural and spiritual roots in the
Judeo-Christian heritage. Most of our friends are guilty of terrible crimes, several
are innocent (as were Jerry Banks and Earl Charles), all are poor, neglected
by friends and Christians, and they are human beings created in God’s likeness.
As we have learned to sit in prison and listen to those daily dying in iron
cages encased in concrete slabs, we have discovered that homelessness, too, is a
death sentence.
Homelessness, like the sentence of death, is abandonment, dereliction. Our
society, through laws and lawyers, courts and judges, has evolved and main-